Shining Empire - On the Verge of Cancellation

Arcade County sent out a new press release announcing they might be cancelling Shining Empire if the games second kickstarter is not successful.

"Shining Empire on the verge of cancellation"

Dallas, Tx - Shining Empire, the hybrid RPG city builder/massive combat game (for Mac and PC) is on the brink of cancellation, citing poor results on Kickstarter with less than 2 weeks to go. Arcade County, the Dallas-based developers behind the ambitious 100+ indie RPG title, are surprised at the low turnout, despite a good amount of videos and information on the project.

"It comes down to a couple of things", says Arcade County head R. Mulvany. "We're only focusing on computers, so console users aren't contributing, and it's a new IP. You see a lot of inexperienced studios rummaging around and finding old IP's to buy on the cheap and then resurrecting them. Those are almost always successful on Kickstarter. To put it into perspective, I've seen new studios acquire an IP and post nothing more than a piece of concept art on Kickstarter and have 1000% more success than we have."

Mulvany is concerned that Kickstarter (and crowdfunding in general) isn't really necessary at this point, since Paypal is really all you need.

"If studios can collect donations themselves via Paypal, why even use Kickstarter? Take Double Fine for example. All they really needed was a donations link. They brought that money to Kickstarter then gave them (and Amazon) 10% of the total. The gaming media gave them that publicity. I think they closed at $3,000,000+. That's $300k they didn't get due to those fees. And it's not as if Kickstarter is protecting anyone's investment. If a company fails to deliver on a product they're screwed."

Arcade County's Kickstarter for Shining Empire would be fortunate to close at 40% funded at this point, but they'll continue to keep it online regardless of where it ends up. The question then becomes: What next?

"A lot of games continue to be worked on if their Kickstarter fails. This is not one of those games. It would be impossible. Not only impossible from a financial standpoint, but if we're not getting enough press/interest to reach our goals then the game simply cannot be appealing enough to gamers. It's not easy to spread the word. If you don't have one of those IP's I talked about, or you don't have some established products out there - you need luck. As it stands right now, we seen to be pretty empty-handed in all those regards."

He is right to a certain extent about Kickstarter, but Pay Pal is not the answer either Just ask Crate about their experience with Pay Pal and not being able to access their money.

There is a reason that you don't see pay pal donations as an option on the kickstarter page until after it is successful (besides the obvious one of diverting the funds and preventing a successful KS) is that pay pal might not release the funds to you as happened with Crate.

Though 10% is a lot cheaper then the 30% for steam early access, the part that sucks as an indi is everyone else has their hand in your pocket, but then again that is how business works in the real world.

This seems pretty amusing. Sending out a pseudo "press release" about the failure of a 4.5K Kickstarter? And the "press release", worded in the 3rd person as if this dude was being interviewed by a news team or something, can't even stay on topic - it veers into some completely unrelated area with the guy ranting about how Kickstarter isn't even "necessary" because direct PayPal would result in less fees. Why is he "concerned" about this? And does this guy really think direct PayPal would have worked better for him? Haha, no way. Also ranting about only existing/acquired IPs getting money on Kickstarter, yet Darkest Dungeon (just one random example plucked off the news page here) is above a quarter million right now while Shining Empire is sitting at $1K. The problem is none of the things he's ranting about, the problem is people don't like his game concept. Seriously, wtf? Perhaps this guy should use the Kickstarter results to learn about what his audience wants, instead of just as the instigation for a temper tantrum.

Originally Posted by Stingray
The problem is none of the things he's ranting about, the problem is people don't like his game concept. Seriously, wtf? Perhaps this guy should use the Kickstarter results to learn about what his audience wants, instead of just as the instigation for a temper tantrum.

I actually read all his kick-starter and it did not make me feel like I wanted to play the game. I just don't like old Jrpg graphics. Though I know, a lot still do.
Maybe some one should post a link to the darkest dungeon kick-starter. Also the interview on how much time they had to invest into it and how much of the game they had to physically get working first. All the great success on kick-starter have great prototypes and they run there campaigns like military campaigns.
Also many kick-starters fail and because the developers are so invested in there product they do anything and everything to continue . There are few games I have happily supported who have failed there kick-starter though bad planning. And the community has kept them afloat. Sorry to dribble on.